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The inventor of splendid arguments with death

At his death in 1936 Miguel de Unamuno was the most influential

thinker in Spain, more renowned than his younger contemporary
Ortega Gasset and regarded by his own aficionados as the greatest
stylist in the Spanish language since Cervantes. Upon learning of
his death, that other extraordinary stylist of the Spanish language,
Jorge Luis Borges (then a young poet) wrote the following brief
obituary: “The Ieading writer in our language is dead.... He was,
before all else, an inventor of splendid argument.... He debated the
I, immortality, language, the cult of Cervantes, faith, ethics, the
regeneration of vocabulary and syntax.”

The only debate, however, to which Borges's random catalogue

does not refer is the principal debate, the argument that undergirds
all of Unamuno's life and thought and gives to it a power most
peculiarly Spanish and most thoroughly universal. It is Unamuno's
contest with death.
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although reflecting his early, middle and late periods, although
dealing with the heroic folly of Don Quixote (“Our Lord Don
Quixote,” 1905), the tragic destiny of men and nations (“The Tragic
Sense of Life,” 1921), and the struggle of Christianity (“The Agony
of Christianity,” 1928) have as their common theme the human
struggle against death. Undoubtedly it is his preoccupation with
death that has impeded Unamuno's reputation in the Anglo-Saxon
world. Our tradition (whatever its pleasure in violence) is neither
fond of death nor hopeful of resurrection; but Spain, a culture
which has stylized violence, is overwhelmed with death and
committed to resurrection.

Unamuno's superficial morbidity—his delight in the mystical

paradoxes wherein death is transformed into life, where
submission to death insures the promise of life, where the
preparation for dying and the manner of death is the
consummation of ordinary life and the viaticum for life everlasting,
where Christs in agony abound and no hieratic Byzantine Christs
nor elegant French crucifixions are to be found—is offset by an
espousal of quotidian life which turns his thanatos into the most
intimate and sensuous of life-affirming doctrines.

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“Our Lord Don Quixote” (brilliantly translated by one of the editors

of the Unamuno enterprise, Anthony Kerrigan) is a hymn to the
divine folly of Don Quxote, a folly and a divinity Unamuno
convinced himself he perceived more truly than the Don's creator,
Cervantes. “I consider myself more Quixotist that Cervantist, and
that I attempt to free Don Quixote from Cervantes himself,
permitting myself on occasion to go so far as to disagree with the
manner in which Cervantes understood and dealt with his two
heroes ... The fact is, I believe that characters of fiction possess a
life of their own within the mind of the author who creates them, as
well as a certain autonomy, and that they obey an intimate logic of
which the author himself is not altogether conscious.”

Unamuno goes on—and the explication of the narrative of “Don

Quixote” which unfolds, followed in the Bollingen edition by 16
additional essays on the implausible logic and consequence of
Quixotism—to set forth the essential premise of all his intellectual
criticism: madness is reality, and historical objectivity is madness.
This definition of the quixotic is obviously at variance with its
received understanding. The chivalric vocation and undertakings
of Don Quixote, continuously pragmatized by his sympathetic
squire, are treated by Unamuno as the ultimate pilgrimage. (“I
believe we might undertake a holy crusade to redeem the
Sepulcher of the Knight of Madness from the power of the
champions of Reason.”) The potentates of reasonableness —the
planners, the scientists, the politicians of the possible—are all
denounced by Unamuno as betrayers of the spirit of the Don.

Those who make the quixotic the impractical, the chimerical, the
hazy dream of better worlds are the real fools, for in Unamuno's
view they strip life of the precise ingredient which makes it worth
living, that it is a continuous struggle with death. Any means by
which a man subverts the kingdom of death is a triumph for life
and, in Unamuno's clever logic, for eternity. Time and history are
death, objectively is death, futurity and planning are death. Life is
existir (which in Unamuno's fantastical associative etymologies is
a modality of ecstasy, the ek-stasi by

Miguel de Unamuno. which man stands outside of himself and

becomes eternal in the moment) and not the ephemeral ester or
the ontological ser. Don Quixote becomes for Unamuno the Spanish
Christian pilgrim for madness and against death (a definition not
at all uncongenial to his contending spiritual descendants R. D.
Laing and Thomas Szasz). The Don exalts an unfamiliar sanity
which other men call insane, a sanity which, parched by
definitions, seeks the waters of eternal life.

Miguel de Unamuno, the quintessential Spaniard of bearded face

and piercing, sad eyes, was born in Basque country, in Bilbao in
1864, in the midst of the Carlist wars. He was born with his first
paradox, master ing a language and producing a heroic literature
to defend a quixotic Basque tradition which had no literature of its
own and which, in familiar separatist logic, regarded Castilian
Spanish as a foreign language.

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After receiving his doctorate in philosophy and classics at the

University of Madrid during the effete eighties he was appointed
professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca in 1891 and
became its rector in 1901, a position he held until his death,
although often stripped of his post, twice exiled, and in the last
months before his death on Dec. 31, 1936, confined by the Fascists
under house arrest. His life was quiet, domestic, serene, although
his words were bitter, hectoring, contentious. He was (and he saw
himself in this respect) a voice crying in the wilderness, like his
beloved Don Quixote. He rarely traveled, except in Spain, and
though he wrote “The Agony of Christianity” while in exile in Paris,
he found Paris and the Parisians frivolous and unnerving.

“The Agony of Christianity,” like every Unamuno work, is based

upon an etymological turn of phrase. The agony of the Christ, the
agony of the Christian man is an agon, a struggle. And with what
does the Jesus of the Cross struggle and against what does
Christianity make contest? With death. The Christian glad tidings
of great joy is that Christ is resurrected, that Christianity triumphs
over death and it inserts life into the dead. The agony is the death
throes of men and, in no less dramatic manner, if the wisdom of
Don Quixote is his sublime movement through death, the wisdom
of Christ is that all men are able to become Quixotes. The argument
of “The Agony of Christianity” is exquisite, but it is hardly an
argument of the head.

- What must be made clear at this juncture before readers dismiss

these murky lucubra tions as those of yet another proud
irrationalist is that Unamuno is a poet, a marvelous poet. Of course
the presence of poet is no more consolatory to most readers than
an out and out irrationalist. Both set the teeth of American culture
on edge. But there is nothing to be done about it. If Unamuno is un-
American, he is incredibly Spanish.

The passion of Spanish literature, what, surrounds its intellectual

history with an alien penumbra, is integrity. Integrity is not simply
moral wholeness and consistency. The moral effect of integrity is
consequential to an interior coherence which might better be
described as integralist. The Spanish literary tradition, a fusion of
three cultures, Chris din, Jewish, Muslim, has no choice but to be
integralist. It can't get rid of its constituents. Unlike other cultures
it chooses not to deny them. It refuses to melt them or to pot them.
It takes its language and its history for what it is (see Amerigô
Castro's magisterial “The Structure of Spanish History” for
confirmation of this line of interpretation), the integration of three
languages and sensibilities, three diversities of race and ambition,
three living cultures, which however much silted over with the
visible patina of regal Christendom contains words, docta, custom,
arts and architectures which are present and procreative even
though Jews and Muslims have all but disappeared from the
peninsula.

Unamuno, the alien Basque, is unafraid therefore of what makes up

Spain. He is Catholic, but the essence of Catholicism is the doubting
man who needs to renew faith daily; he is modern man, but his
traditionalism informs him that Spain's avidity to become
industrial is a hopeless ambition, given the untechnical nature of
the Spanish temperament; he is a classicist who sees beneath the
fundament of Spain's triune culture, ancient Rome, ancient Greece
and vivid paganism. The only hope then for Spanish man and
culture is to transmogrify the elements, to reconceive Spanish
personality as integrity. The drive is towards interiority, for there
integrity is to be found.

The Spanish man works from within outwards. He can sit at his
cafe in the square of Salamanca and appear to contradict himself
endlessly, but he is only conceding to the evanescence and
imprecision of language. He can point out one thing one day and
deny it the next, but he is still telling a coherent truth, which is that
integrity holds truth to be more complex than language.

The struggle to tell truth through language requires that the poetic
thinker or the thinking poet force himself to pretend to sanity.
Unamuno was a sane madman, like Don Quixote, whom he claimed
to know better than his creator or even like Jesus Christ, whom he
also claimed to understand better than His Creator—the reason for
this being that he, Miguel de Unamuno, suffered the consequence
of their existence, whereas their creators only created them.

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The difficulty of Unamuno's thought rests more with us, his

readers, than with what he wrote. We want something other than
what he allows. We want an argument with a linear unfolding, a
systematic coherence, a persuasive rationality. This is so because
most of us use language principally as a means of- imposing
structure upon the chaos of our feelings and perceptions. Rational
argument, we seem to be saying, must be preferred to outpourings
and dramatics because what else can be made lucid if not
language.

Unamuno, of course, understood long ago what we are only

beginning to find out, namely, that language is as parlous as the
condition of the man who speaks it. Both are riddled with
confusion, contrariety, constipation. But whereas we might, for that
reason, give ourselves over to purgings of language (imagining
thereby that we purge ourselves), Unamuno celebrated our chaos.
He could do this because he believed that the chaos was more
apparent than real. Man thinks his world is chaotic and for that
reason, surrendering to it, flies off in all directions, but if one
accepts as Unamuno did, that the chaos is only the ministry of
death and that the truth of life is to be found in the structures men
build against their death, neither the vagaries of language nor the
ravings of the heart are any longer alarming.

The center of the argument underlying Unamuno's most famous

book, “The Tragic Sense of Life,” is that all truly human beings
thirst for immortality. The thirst for immortality is not simply the
passion for glory, for monuments of memory and recollection, but
the real care to endure, to go on with life beyond the formal term of
life. The curse of modern men and nations is that they construct
fabrications of eternal life, artificialities and simulacra that appear
as breakers against death, but are in fact so dishonest that they fail
not alone to represent eternal life but guarantee to death the final
victory. The technology of modern culture, the bureacratization of
spirit, the atomization of the person—all the means by which mass
cultures have sought to organize power es the instrument for the
perpetuation of the historical nation—are fated to kill, for the thin
breath of living men is stifled by such ebormity.

Unamuno's recommendations, the return to agonic Christianity, the

vitalization of personal integralism which, not unlike the Buddhism
Unamuno admires, distinguishes between specious and ultimate
reality, are hardly practical programs. But Unamuno doesn't care a
fig for programs. He isn't really interested in saving culture unless
it cares first. His own sensibility is too proud, too autonomous, too
solitary and monkish to really bother with what others think is
important.

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo de Larraza, to cite his full name,

Miguel of Unamuno, Marrow of the Race, like the Biblical Isaiah,
giving himself and others prophetic names, names which suggest
the shorthand of his vocation, has been dead now nearly four
decades, but there are few thinkers in our time who are both as
irrelevant and relevant as he. His irrelevance consists in the
obvious fact that he didn't know what happened after 1936. He
never lived to see the principalities and dominions of death hold
sway over the face of the earth. But his vision of an alternative,
perhaps the only one we have, the eros of life refusing to succumb
has never been more relevant. His paradoxes give hope, and what
is more splendid for literature than to give hope? ■

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